


With the Wild Geese

by halotolerant



Category: Colditz (1972), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types
Genre: Austerity Britain, M/M, Prisoner of War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 00:44:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The invitation has been sitting on the mantelpiece in Dick’s living room for almost a month. Not his usual style, displaying his social life like that - not that anyone but the char lady would have seen it - but when it had arrived he’d felt a momentary impulse to let it fall into the waste paper basket, and for that he deserved to see it constantly and learn not to be a bloody fool.</p><p>Unfinished business gets in the way of new plans; tonight is necessary, is an ending, and after he has gone through it he will, perhaps, stand some chance of freedom."</p>
            </blockquote>





	With the Wild Geese

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kindkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/gifts).



With the Wild Geese

\- - -

The invitation has been sitting on the mantelpiece in Dick’s living room for almost a month. Not his usual style, displaying his social life like that - not that anyone but the char lady would have seen it - but when it had arrived he’d felt a momentary impulse to let it fall into the waste paper basket, and for that he deserved to see it constantly and learn not to be a bloody fool.

Unfinished business gets in the way of new plans; tonight is necessary, is an ending, and after he has gone through it he will, perhaps, stand some chance of freedom.

Not having slept the night in his own flat, Dick reckons he’s made an excellent job of getting ready in the time he’s had between slipping back in yesterday’s clothes and now, almost on schedule, striding forth into the chill air of the stairwell.

That morning, before driving Dick to the train station, Charles had made him a plate of scrambled something-purporting-to-be-eggs with lots of toast and dripping, washed down with black tea. Dick had tucked in heartily despite expecting a good lunch back in London, and since that never materialised he’s glad he did, or he’d be even hungrier now. He’s had years, of course, to get accustomed to the feeling, but perhaps because of, rather than despite this, it makes him uneasy.

Fortunately, the party he’s rushing to now promises a buffet of some distinction, if the invitation is anything to go by; a stiff, pure white card that would make you think paper rationing was some other country’s problem.

Having bathed for the second time in the day – and it had been necessary, because the train and then tube journeys had been rushed and cramped, and if it had felt like distancing himself in another way from Charles, and attempting to erase the conversation with Haydon, that was coincidental – he’d extracted his best suit from the wardrobe and taken a few moments to choose his cufflinks, then considered his reflection, the sight that the world would see:

Smartly dressed young naval officer, no visible scratches or marks, no parts missing; rare enough nowadays to make a good impression by itself, all that.

He’s never allowed himself to dress sloppily: before, during or after the war – he knows the level of respect you grant yourself will affect that given you by others. But one reason he let himself get so close to running out of time today was a premonition of hours trying on outfits and sighing at the mirror; that’s never been him either.

Of course, for a long chunk of the war he never saw a mirror at all, not more than the tiny hand-held shaving things a few chaps had, at least until someone put a compass in one and they all got banned.

In 1943, still reeling with the euphoria of escape, in a cramped attic room in Austria, he’d caught his own eye in the black-spotted mirror hanging on the wall, and on first glance had scarcely noticed his reflection. Then, looking back slowly, the way he would have done if he’d spotted an enemy in the undergrowth, he’d studied himself, taking in the dark circles under his eyes, the faint crinkle of what might one day be worry lines, and the scarecrow mop that had become of his hair.

But in the essentials, his face had not in three years changed much. That had been the most unsettling thing, that so much could have seethed and altered in his mind, and yet left no visible mark.

Out of the main doors of the flats now, he crosses the wide driveway that is separated from the road that runs parallel by a low pine hedge. There’s a satisfying crunch from the gravel under his feet; for years now he has loved walking out, to anywhere, for any reason. And just now everything has a tendency to feel satisfying, his whole body still limber and loose from last night’s activities. Charles’ welcome extends to more than just hot breakfasts, and almost makes up for having to travel out to the dry-rot ridden manor house in Kent that smells of mothballs and Charles’ parents’ dogs, although to the latter Dick knows he ought to be grateful, since visits to breeding kennels in the Midlands are what take Charles’ parents away from the roost.

One solution, of course, would be to move Charles in with him – ever since the first weeks of the Blitz, it’s been common enough to have a lodger, even if one isn’t obviously pressed for money, no one would ask questions – and thereby provide himself with scrambled eggs and other things, so to speak, on tap. But luckily Charles rather likes living, if not in the middle, at least on the outskirts of nowhere and is very serious about continuing to work in his father’s small law offices in Tunbridge Wells.

It is always easy to leave Charles behind. That is why Dick goes back to him.

They’d met at a party given by one of Dick’s pre-war friends to celebrate the re-opening of the West End in general and the premiere of his own play in particular. “Oh, you must meet Charles,” the host had cried. “Or at least, Charles won’t forgive me if I don’t introduce you. He was category 4F during the war, you know, heart murmur or something, and I think the uniform obsession has rather to do with that.”

Dick hadn’t felt it was the time to mention that, whilst he still held his rank, he hadn’t been in uniform in years.

Charles had turned out to be a leanly muscled, rather pretty young man with a tendency to blush. “I’m afraid I can’t really talk about the war,” he’d said, speaking rather more to his drink than to Dick. “We went to stay at a kennel my Mother works within the Orkneys. Frightfully dull really.”

Dick leant casually against a convenient mantelpiece, stretching his legs out, relishing the sweetness of knowing just how his evening would end. “Well, I don’t want to talk about the war.”

Charles _is_ rather dull, and if he’s escaped the family obsession with dogs it only appears to be because he has no particular interests at all, besides those he indulges with Dick a few times a month, but then they never talk a great deal and the rest of it satisfactory enough, not least because Dick still has no wish to talk at all.

“You’ve been off with your bit of stuff,” Haydon had observed as Dick walked along the platform at Charing Cross that morning, fresh from Charles and the almost-eggs, Haydon emerging from the steam of the engine like a ghost, so that Dick had to struggle not to flinch in surprise.

Turning the shiver into a shrug, Dick had met his gaze coolly: “I thought we were meeting at the restaurant. How did you find me here?”

He’d planned to get his thoughts together on the train, to have his answer ready and then figure out how to phrase it, but as he’d sat watching frosted fields rumble past the window, he’d found himself thinking about tonight’s party instead, trying to predict and plan in order to confront a situation he had no idea about.

Pat had always disapproved of that, a voice in his head helpfully reminded him.

Haydon smiled with a casual warmth Dick wanted to believe. “I could tell you that I have a very good idea what you do, that I’d be no use at my job if I couldn’t find out something as simple as that. But why resort to smoke and mirrors? ‘Elementary my dear Watson’, is I believe the phrase. Why should you, who live in Highgate and I, who work in Westminster, meet in a restaurant in this part of London unless one of us were arriving...” he looked at his watch, “only barely on time by train. But now I can see you wanted to linger wherever it is you’ve come from.”

Had it been amusement, approval, distaste or something rather stronger? Dick can never quite read Bill Haydon and it troubles him.

When they’d bumped into each other on the Heath, two weeks earlier, it really had appeared to be a chance meeting and Dick had genuinely believed the man’s expressions of amazement and surprise. But none of that had been real. Or at least – Dick tries to sort it out in his mind, logically, calmly, things he has evidence for and things he doesn’t – it certainly hadn’t been an accident.

Haydon’s SOE cell had been his lifeline out of occupied Europe after his escape from Colditz. And before they’d been able to move him, he’d wound up helping out with more than a few of their ‘operations’, able to offer his fluency in the Austro-Bavarian dialect, only too delighted to finally do something concrete for the war effort. His efforts had evidently made an impression on MI9 overall; after his official debriefing by the Royal Navy, back in Britain in early 1944, a man with a briefcase had been ushered into the room and left alone with him. Would Dick, the man wanted to know, be interested in a little sojourn on the coast of France, posing as a somewhat foolish Austrian author trying to photograph birds? Perhaps photographing other things? It would be dangerous, but – he implied, without quite saying – potentially of high importance.

Dick had no wish to go back to the confinement of submarines and the prolonged company of his own thoughts. Intelligence work in France occupied him until June ’44 when the American front line passed through his part of Normandy, at which point he volunteered himself to assist in information-gathering from captured Gestapo and SS and their various documents. Although he’d never officially resigned his commission, it seemed tacitly understood that he was no longer under the aegis of the Armed Forces.  

Eventually, and with something strangely like reluctance, he’d returned again to Britain in December 1945 – almost a year ago now. A few more months of reports and other paperwork, and then silence. His Navy wages continued to be paid regularly; he knew before he saw Haydon that the Service had not finished with him.

When, at Haydon’s insistence, they’d gone on from the Heath to a Lyons corner-house for a longer chat, and the word ‘recruiting’ had eventually come up, his first emotion had been relief.

Twelve months with only his own thoughts, and they’d proved as poor companions as he predicted, no matter how many Charleses you threw at them.

“This is a somewhat bigger cheese than SOE, as you might have gathered, and we don’t normally approach so directly,” Haydon had explained, lighting a cigarette. “Normally, I’d stalk you around the place, do half a hundred reports, get someone to vet everything and then, if you were interested, send you off to our Nursery for basic training. Then you might – _might_ – get an assignment. But firstly, I saw everything I needed to know about you when we were in Austria, and I’ve managed to convince my chief that I know what I’m talking about in that respect, and secondly, you’re needed for something pretty hot, and as soon as possible.”

Haydon had been the one to suggest leaving it some days before meeting again - “I want to know I’ve got your considered decision.” Dick, thinking of the white card on his mantelpiece, had chosen today, and –having already planned his visit to Kent – suggested the restaurant near Charing Cross accordingly.

But to Dick’s surprise, Haydon had lead him from the mainline platform directly into the Underground and onto the Northern Line, alighting at Highgate and causing Dick to worry that Haydon was about to insist for whatever reason that they go to Dick’s flat. Several possibilities presented themselves, some more appealing than others, none what he had been planning for.

But Haydon set off at a brisk pace up the hill, covering the ground easily, chatting carelessly about rationing, Christmas shopping and the difficulty of obtaining oil paints, breath white in the freezing air, Dick keeping pace without difficulty but becoming increasingly confused and hungry.

Haydon’s energy had always been extraordinary, dazzling and powerful. When Dick had first met him, Haydon had been undercover as a travelling salesman, romancing the wife of a high-ranking Waffen-SS officer with every appearance of sincerity, filling in the gaps with another SOE agent called Joan who snapped at everyone else but followed Haydon around like a lamb. Dick had only once seen him silenced; another British SOE agent, a young man, arriving one night to talk strategy, who had at one point in a muttered discussion simply taken Haydon’s hand and said “Bill. No,” in his quiet, almost mumbled voice, and without further discussion Haydon had sat back, surrendering.

Dick had noted that the man Haydon had taken him to see today – an unnamed, sharp-eyed personage whom they first encountered as he clambered out of the Highgate Men’s Bathing Pond, pushing thin sheets of floating ice of his way to do so – also seemed to merit a degree of special deference.

“Here he is sir.”

The man, white with cold but scarcely seeming to notice it, wrapped himself in a towel and nodded. “Yes, I can see what you mean,” was all he said before disappearing into the hut to change, but Haydon seemed to take it as an important statement.

Sitting down on a nearby bench and gesturing for Dick to join him, Haydon then put his case again, offering some of the more concrete evidence that Dick had asked for, even copies of certain documents retrieved from his inner pocket. Yes, it was quite certain that Count Paul von Eissinger had been latterly involved in the several of the various ministries and committees – Nazi organisation being a hideous mess of interlocking remits – that were involved in weapon design. It was quite certain that he remained in possession of valuable, unique information on germ warfare and quite certain he was living in East Berlin and being heavily courted by the Russians.

“And I’m quite certain that a man who was prepared to share so much with you six years ago,” Haydon had concluded, tapping a copy of Dick’s original wartime debriefing, “would be even more prepared to share everything with you now, especially under the right...circumstances.” His voice had been low, almost a murmur, only sensible given that they sat in public, but nonetheless managing to make Dick’s skin tingle.

Despite the heat of exercise seeping from him, Dick had already made himself freeze completely, staring forward without reaction to any information, only allowing himself the tap of his cigarette against his nail. Whether it was to protect himself or to impress Haydon, he couldn’t have said.

At Haydon’s last words, however, Dick had finally turned to face him.

“Suppose I say I’m not inclined to that sort of thing?”

Haydon gave a short laugh, almost incredulous. “And by ‘that sort of thing’ you are referring to..?”

“Domesticity.”

“I wouldn’t think of it like that, Player. I’d think of it as war. Which you are very good at indeed.”

Dick shivers again, remembering the look in Haydon’s eyes. He’s shivering in any case, standing here on the pavement in the bitter wind, waiting for a taxi to emerge from the inky gloom of a November evening, but it’s more than that. Haydon’s eyes are very dark, very intense, and when they look at you as if they _admire_ you, it’s quite hard to pull away. For a moment he’d wanted nothing more than to say ‘Yes, yes of course, anything’, but he’d recalled his own distraction, on the train journey and earlier – Charles fading out of focus even as they cleaved together, other images before his eyes – and asked for more time to think.

Once tonight is over, he’ll be able to think straight again. Close the door behind him on all the old stuff and look to the future.

Finally the lights of a taxi come into view and he hails it down, fumbling in his overcoat for a handkerchief as he gets inside. The winter of 1946 has been cold all over London, but coldest up here on Highgate Hill. That had been why he’d chosen to live here, after all – during the viewings it had been summer, and in air thick with pollen and smog the freshness had seemed appealing. Also the fact that the area had come relatively unscathed through the bombing, leaving a world of Victorian Gothic brick terraces and tall plane trees that might have sprung from the colour plates of an Edwardian children’s book.

 _Let’s pretend..._ That’s how the game would start. _Let’s pretend the war never happened, just for a minute let’s pretend nothing changed at all, that we are all the people we would have been otherwise; that there is nothing to escape from and no need to recover..._

Having given the driver his directions, he sits back in the corner of the seat, gazing out of the window as the tree-lined, brick-walled avenues of Highgate give way to streets of shops and flats. Times are still too hard for many people to leave lights blazing, even now it’s permitted, but the odd illuminated front room or late-opening chemist are enough reminder that the blackout has truly gone.

The lights have come back on all over Europe, and like one of those ridiculous house-party games he remembers at Ablethwaite from before the war, nothing looks quite the same as they left it.

Whenever he recalls Ablethwaite, he sees the sun shining, which is honestly ridiculous. For one thing, most of the times he’s been there were the Christmas school holidays when he was still considered too young to make a Channel crossing on the way back home. Later, he’d gone back for the odd week in the summer at cousin Cicely’s insistence, but half of that time it had rained, or at least he remembers a very great amount of effort being expended on concocting games to play indoors. It was never as interesting or entertaining as Berlin or the Riviera, but sometimes there was amusement. There was nothing quite so quintessentially English, he’d been sure, with the joyous disrespect of the young, as buggering a beautiful young baronet on a genuine Indian tiger-skin rug in front of a fire, and going down for tea afterwards, and he’d laughed to himself to have done it.

He isn’t sure of the man’s name now – Finch? French? Farringe? The most he’d ever really recalled had been the noise he made _during_ , which he’d imitated for Paul mere weeks later with glee.

Paul. It won’t do now, to think about Paul. About what Haydon’s told him of how he is now, or any of the ways Dick remembers him.

Memories are never clean, never incorruptible. Tonight he will counter memory with reality, and it be overwhelmed like a candle in the sunshine and have no more power.

As the taxi nears the centre of London, the buildings become higher and thicker, and the gaping scars of bomb damage more frequent. Noticing this, Dick draws himself up, reaching in his pocket for his cigarette case, seeking a distraction. Arriving tired is one thing, to arrive tired and morose would make the evening impossible.

And after last night he is tired; he never sleeps well now with anyone else in the room, which is rather strange considering all the years it never troubled him. That might be an anecdote for tonight, although he’ll have to find some way to tell it suitably in the presence of ladies.

On the few occasions he’s found himself knowingly talking to other ex-POWs so far, most have always agreed that it was very odd to be entirely without women and then very awkward to be among them again. Dick’s only stood and nodded. But then, if you’re in that majority of chaps who feel _that way_ about women, perhaps it does get rather complicated. For his part, Dick’s always found them rather easy and rather alien, and none of that has changed.

His father had never seemed to find it odd that Dick didn’t talk much about girls, but then his father, for as long as Dick knew him, was for all intents and purposes uninterested in them as well.

Dick can’t remember a time when he wasn’t more or less aware of the story. His father had married the first and only woman he’d ever fallen in love with, and hadn’t cared that she was Austro-Czech, illegitimate and only being educated at the same Swiss finishing school as his sister because the Austrian half of her background were wealthy behind their wall of anonymity. They’d wed in 1913, just in time for a German-speaking woman to have a ghastly time in England, but apparently she’d been contented enough and after Dick’s birth two years later, something close to blissful. What Dick can remember of her is the cradle-songs, Austrian folk tunes, in her rich, soothing voice, and the way she smelt of sweet powder when he sat on her lap and rested his head against her chest.

Marta Player had seen her husband return from the Great War, and they’d been granted almost another whole year together before she succumbed to the influenza that swept through the continent. Despite everything his family said – offers to take Dick at Ablethwaite with his English cousins, and many eligible, suitable women paraded in front of him – Dick’s father had insisted that, having accepted a posting with the British Diplomatic Corps in Berlin, he would take Dick with him.

So Dick had arrived with his Nanny at the spacious flat in Berlin that remains the only place he’s ever really called home. There, he and his father had been quite happy, speaking more German than English, because that had been _her_ language.

He’d been eight before his father had relented to family advice – which even from that age, Dick remembers as being delivered with the subtlety of an axe to a tree - to send him to an English prep school. Dick had entered a world where more than half the boys had lost fathers and uncles and even beloved elder brothers to ‘the Hun’ and liking anything ‘Boche’ was tantamount to treason.

Rapidly, he’d learnt to escape, whether physically to equipment cupboards and attics, or in the woods on the school grounds, or simply by disappearing into his reading, deaf to what they said around him. After all, it didn’t matter; he had friends back home who were happy to laugh with him at his imitations of English boys, during every sweet day of his holidays.

Moving on to Dartmouth Naval College at thirteen – one thing he had been enraptured by in his lessons had been tales of Drake, Raleigh and most of all Nelson, whose death he had restaged several times with his friend Konrad, happy in the knowledge that in that war at least, Britain and Prussia had been united – he’d been more careful in his approach. He never lied, but learnt how to present himself acceptably to different people, to think before he spoke and calculate his audience, to mistrust any and all received wisdom until he’d given it sufficient consideration, to draw his own conclusions.

He can see now that all this made his progressing maturation and self-discovery a good deal easier than perhaps it might have been. You were not _supposed_ to think about boys the way you _were_ supposed to think about girls, even if you could find it in the Bible and Plato and Shakespeare. Well, you were not _supposed_ to feel sorry for the Germans either, but he’d seen them, starving in the streets under the yoke of reparation payments for a war no ordinary person had any real say in starting.

Always, to him then, Germany had meant freedom. Every glorious summer he’d gone back to Berlin, to a father who didn’t inquire very strictly about where he went and with whom, and he’d found people and parties that had seemed quite extraordinarily wonderful, and all the more proof that all the _supposeds_ back in England didn’t have the first clue what they were on about.

Champagne, schnapps and swing dancing. Fancy dress and scavenger hunts. Snowball fights in the Unter den Linden, cocktail parties in the middle of the day that went on till the middle of the next one. A glorious, mad mixture of people for whom the only rule had been enjoyment.

Paul von Eissinger, only two years older than him but somehow knowing so much more, leading him away from a gathering with a smile that was almost smug, drawing him into a guest bedroom and murmuring soothingly at him as if he were one of his horses: “Mein lieber Dick, die Summe unseres Lebens sind die Stunden, in denen wir liebten…” _Dick, the sum of our lives is the hours in which we were loving…_  Someone else’s quote, he’d learnt afterwards, but then Paul had always known what to say.

It had been breathlessly good, and so astonishingly, easily delicious and it felt as if it was exactly what he was _supposed_ to be doing with his body.

After that, he’d been blissful indeed. All the sex in the world to be having, and with the magic secret that with men, yes it was forbidden, yes you couldn’t shout about it or get married, but who wanted that? Nothing came of it - that was the glory as far as Dick, at seventeen, was concerned. No one fell pregnant or told their fathers or wrote letters begging for weddings, all the things that kept his fellow cadets at Dartmouth from daring to do what they wanted. Men with other men were free; that was what he had concluded.

\- - -

He realises when the driver loudly clears his throat that the taxi has halted, engine thrumming, and Dick pays before getting out into the biting cold. There’s a frost forming on the pavements, glittering and beautiful and dangerous, and he treads carefully as he walks to the thick steps of Portland stone leading up to a wide set of wooden doors in the freshly-painted neo-Georgian building that is his destination.

Beyond the doors waits a liveried servant who bows, silently assists him out of his coat and hat and then gestures him onwards over a marble floor to another set of doors, inset with glass, through which he can see a whirl of colour and movement.

Another servant opens the door before him, and on the threshold Dick pauses a moment, taking a deep breath, freezing his expression, trying to clear his mind.

He’s ready, he’s calm. He can think before he speaks, he can present himself the way he needs to. He will be debonair and sociable, and if he’s bored or annoyed he can always think of the small bruises on his hips where Charles held on so tightly less than twelve hours ago, or the way Haydon’s eyes bore into him, admiring; it’s always been little things like that, little secrets, that help him build his walls.

\- - -

 _The Duke and Duchess of Carlisle Cordially Invite You to a Celebration of the Engagement of Their Daughter, Lady Henrietta Grafton, to Sir Timothy Downing_

“Well done, Tim,” Dick mutters under his breath, looking round as he finally steps through the doors into the main reception room. Talk about pretending the war never happened: here it’s as if the last three or four wars never happened – it could easily be a scene from a hundred years ago, if you lost the electric light fittings and added a few more beards.

Someone carrying a tray of food instantly materialises at his elbow, and he takes three of the little things in deference to his pinched stomach. He finds it’s still hard to see any food left behind or taken away from him, hard to really believe that he doesn’t need to hoard everything he gets a shot at, but tonight willpower has to win out; he doubts the Duke and Duchess would appreciate him pouring the entire salver down his trousers for later.

“Player, old man!” Tim Downing is coming towards him, evidently poised near the door to pounce on his favoured guests. “Wonderful to see you! How are you?”

“Impressed,” Dick answers, taking his hand in a firm grip. “Good to be here. Congratulations.”

Tim grins happily. “I was saying to Henrietta only this morning how pleased I was that I ran into you at that Ministry bash. Wouldn’t have had a bally clue how to track you down otherwise – got most people’s details from the War Office records courtesy of Father-in-Law-To-Be, but you’re classified it seems. I shan’t ask, of course. But it’s damn good just to know you got through! We could have used your contribution in the postcard collection, you know.”

Dick gives a repentant shrug. “As I told you, it took me a long time to get back to England, and by then the postal system in Germany had by all accounts almost broken down – didn’t want to clog it up.”

Tim’s never been subtle, everything he feels shows up on his face, and as exasperating as he can be, Dick’s always been rather fond of him for it. His clearly genuine pleasure their chance meeting had swayed Dick’s heart and made him exchange contact information when he could easily have claimed a dozen excuses.

He had not anticipated this gathering, had not realised that a simple effort to please Tim would offer him an opportunity he knows he might never quite have felt strong enough to seek out otherwise.

“Well, you can tell us all about it now, old chap,” Tim says, all welcoming smiles, leading him deeper into the room, towards a group of six or seven men and a few ladies, immersed in conversation near one of the huge fireplaces.

As they approach, the circle opens. Dick is holding himself very still, breathing very levelly, looking from one face to the next, registering the ones he knows, trying to smile naturally when he sees them, until he realises he’s looked at everyone, and his heart is pounding too hard, and there’s no reason for it at all.

Dick arranged the day to be filled with distractions, with the anxieties and consolations brought by Charles and Haydon, and it’s been completely unnecessary.

Pat isn’t here.

Maybe expecting him was an over-estimation of Tim’s ability to let old-POW-ties win out over class barriers.

“Player!” someone is saying, stepping forward to shake his hand, and he blinks, focussing, reaching out in return, exchanging exclamations and greetings, listening to introductions and then to stories and then telling his own, editing details here and there as he goes along so that it will fit the shape his audience want to hear.

They’re keen enough listeners, but he does notice as his story progresses, past his escape from the light-well behind the theatre and the nerve-wracking journey through the mountains, and into those of his exploits with the SOE that he can talk about, that some of the men are looking away, subdued and restless.

For some present here, the war was mere days of actual engagement as Germany swept through Belgium and France, followed by five years looking at stone walls. A hard sentence for simply missing the boat, in some cases for staying to fight a rearguard when others had already left Dunkirk, but there were no medals in it, and no stories to thrill a crowded room.

No matter how much Dick would like to assert that it makes no difference, that they were all at the whim of luck and chance, the relief he feels at not being one of them would make it a lie.

“Good show,” Tim is saying now, clapping him on the arm. “I was there till the bitter end, you know. Not all that bitter actually, when it came to it, rather calm in some ways. Colonel Preston saw to that. And do you know it’s being said now that more people got out of Colditz than any other prison camp? Brilliant, isn’t it? Of course, you two were among the first.”

Dick smiles, nodding, then thinks and looks up again, confused, twisting about where he stands, searching...

Pat Grant is standing right next to him.

Next to him and slightly back, perfectly placed to be just beyond his peripheral vision.

Pat Grant, standing straight as a pillar, arms folded, smoking. Nothing and everything like Dick remembers him.

Not a memory. He is here.

As Dick takes this in, his skin flushes hot and then cold, a sensation rippling over him like water, a strange heavy awareness of himself, like the first time someone pointed a gun at him.

“I didn’t realise you were there,” he hears himself saying, unnecessarily. His mouth is dry and his tongue sticks as he tries to move it.

There’s something like a smile moving Pat’s mouth. “Hello, Dick. It’s good to see you too.” His gaze is firm and unwavering, almost defiant. “You missed your train in ’42, I take it?”

Four years and a brave new world away, and Pat can still remember how that escape was planned to work. Of course he can – that’s Pat all over.

Dick didn’t need another reason to return in his head to the Last Day, but he’s there now, excited, afraid, thrilled and despairing and desperate, full of that feeling that is more than anger, so powerful he can’t process it, and struggling to control his breathing.

Slowly, he shakes his head, and somehow provides an answer that is careless and appropriate and level-toned: “No, the Gestapo were kind enough to choose that day to run a check on the train – we had to start walking. We lasted three weeks before someone cottoned onto us, and then Peter got shot – not too bad, but enough to send him home. I went back to stew another year. You probably heard the rest.”

He really doesn’t want to talk any more about Haydon just now.

Pat nods quickly. “I read about it at the time you made your home run – they even put your photograph in the _Mail_. ‘Daring POW escapes German Fortress’ and all that. Good for morale, I suppose. I had been wondering what had happened to you.  And to Peter, of course.”

Steady, measured words, and Pat’s intense gaze; he’s never been a man to give things away, and it’s been years since Dick practised the subtle art of reading him.

“And then I wondered,” Pat’s continuing, still so calm, as if they’re back in Colditz, in the earliest, simplest days, discussing hypothetical post-war politics or whether ink or shoe-polish stained wool more convincingly, “what – after all our preparation – could possibly have been wrong with the original plan.”

“There was nothing wrong with the plan,” Dick points out. “We never knew which route would be better, mine and Peter’s or yours and Carrington’s.” And then, because it’s the damn truth and why shouldn’t it be: “That was about the only thing that cheered me up, when they dragged me back, having Simon show me your postcard.”

“Uncle Phil and Auntie Pat,” Pat smiles wryly now. “What’s worse is I had an Aunt Patricia. Terrifying woman, very fond of parakeets and crochet.”

Dick chuckles despite himself – Pat could always get that out of him, with his dry tone and the glint in his eye.

And then he can’t think what to say at all. In the same way that the thick smell of pot-pourri, once encountered in a master’s study at prep school, had taken him with a yearning thud of his heart back to the flat in Berlin, laughing with Pat has pushed him the rest of the way to not just remembering but _knowing_ what it is to be standing like this with this man, fighting feelings and searching for words.

He had told himself it was because he was young when he knew Pat, young and more innocent than he knew at the time. Over the years with the SOE, he’d flattered himself that he’d become someone not easily unsettled, and had tried to believe that in any case, his memories were clouded, and not as it had really been.

But he feels exactly as he always did, and they wait, watching each other; the silence is somehow not quite awkward. Dick can stand some staring; he realises now that he’s been waiting since 1942 to see all this again. To see Pat looking back at him.

In 1942, on a road just outside the Colditz perimeter fence, on an escape that had no particular reason to be more successful than any of the others they’d tried, Pat had said “See you in Switzerland,” and Dick answered “Right!” and they set off in opposite directions, and for all this time that was all Dick had as an ending.

Tonight, in several ways, he had planned, at last, to say goodbye.

But they are simply looking at each other; four years and a war gone by and both still alive, perhaps that is reason enough for some pause.

“...but Pat can tell you all about that, can’t you Pat?” someone cries out. It is Tim – Dick had forgotten that they stood in a flock of people – Tim bringing his fiancée for introductions, clearly delighting her with tales of prison camp derring-do, and now several pairs of eyes are turned, waiting for some kind of confirmatory anecdote.

Slowly, Pat turns away, and, smiling politely, launches into a well-worn story about the difficulties of suitably filling a brassiere when impersonating a woman for the purposes of escape, as he himself had done from Laufen. It is amusing, unchallenging and mildly titillating and the audience enjoys it.

Dick lets other people come to stand in front of him, until there is a barrier between them. Pat has always hated telling this story, and he finds himself recoiling from listening to words no one else realises are being forced out.

It would easy enough, just now, simply to leave.

That is after all how it’s always been with them. The ever-present need to get away.

\- - -

What had been his first conversation with Pat Grant? Dick can’t remember, can’t remember a great deal from the early weeks of incarceration in Colditz, although he feels he ought to.

The newly-arrived British officers – and there’d been few enough of them, then – had exchanged all the information that was usually considered important; name, age, service, rank, family background, school, and some kind of subtle division had instantly emerged between regulars and reservists.

Dick hadn’t cared. He noticed in a vague sort of way that he always seemed to be in a group with Muir and Downing, but, relieved of the burden of having to maintain alertness, to evade capture and endure questioning, he’d been no longer able to keep his mind from drifting.

An echoing, draughty castle, full of Germans, full of what was still for him the language of home, and whenever he paused he’d heard the same voice rising out from it:

 _You know what I feel about Britain._

Paul always knew what to say, and he’d said it, very well.

Had surrounded Dick in a flurry of pre-war luxury; hot baths and silk and caviar and indolent conversation, reminding him with all the small associations – nothing so crude as to say it directly – that, really, their loyalty had always been to each other.

That ever since they were teenagers, no matter what happened, who else they befriended or went to bed with, no matter how long passed between meetings, they’d still shared secrets they told no one else. That Paul’s delight had always been to introduce Dick to wonders – pleasures, philosophies, pastimes – that he’d never otherwise have thought of, whilst in his turn Dick was the only one who could give Paul genuine delight, the only one Paul allowed to see any weakness.

Like during the sixteen day Nazi Pageant that been the Berlin Olympics, when Dick had never left Paul’s set of rooms in the von Eissinger mansion. It had been so sure that Paul would be an Olympian that Dick had the leave booked anyway, and after two month of unanswered letters he’d simply presented himself at the front door, not letting anyone stop him, announcing that he was here for his holiday and Paul was damn well going to entertain him.

Paul had been sitting in a wheelchair, stiff in his spinal brace, staring out of the window; you could hear the sound of music, people already finding excuses to celebrate. For a moment he’d stared up at Dick with glassy blankness, then colour had risen in his cheeks and they’d had a ferocious argument, which somehow ended with both of them on Paul’s bed, sharing a glass of brandy whilst they caught their breath and finally embracing, pretending neither one of them was crying.

The world didn’t follow the plans you had for it; it was just then, at twenty-one, that Dick began to understand this.

“Promise to tell me if I hurt you,” Dick had murmured, reaching out, and Paul had shivered under his fingers and bitten his lip. His ‘lower nervous function’ as the doctors delicately put it, was unimpaired; he was going to be able to walk again soon. He would never again be the dashing sportsman or the greatest dancer – his drive to succeed would have to find another focus, and for a few days at least, Dick supplied himself as an alternative.

Dick had liked the close heat of the bedroom, the cocoon of sheets, the layers of sweat, the tiny murmurs between them. He liked the way Paul came to life at his touch.

Outside the house, events rolled on, people shouting in the streets with what was probably mere drunken joy and pride, but perhaps not always. Although by now, training in the Royal Navy, he identified himself as British, Germany was the place containing everything and everyone Dick loved; he didn’t want to know about the foulness creeping through it. But, by 1936, it had been almost impossible to go a day without witnessing something that pained him. If Paul hadn’t been confined indoors, Dick might well have stayed inside anyway.

It hurt him, when three years later the two countries of his heart went to war again, he wished there was no necessity for it, but the necessity was there – all he had seen in Berlin, all his father had told him about, meant that of that he had long been convinced.

He had never met Paul again in peacetime.

 “You know what I feel about Britain,” Paul had said, with everything that had been between them clear in his eyes. In Dick’s mind the words echoed back and back, with their strange mixture of affection and accusation and their intense sincerity.

And Paul had known full well how Dick felt about Germany, and just how much of that was ascribable to how he felt about Paul.

It would have been possible to return to the cocoon, then. To have taken more time to consider his answer, to have gone back to Paul’s apartment and tried to resurrect the past, when things were gentle and intimate, and the truth could almost be ignored. He’d felt a longing for it, of course he had, an instinctual wish that the world might be an easy place.

In the draughts of Colditz castle, eating black bread with the occasional scrape of lard, sleeping on straw covered in damp sheets, idling around a courtyard with nothing useful to do, Dick let himself imagine where he might be instead, if he’d done what Paul asked.

Sitting on stone steps, watching over many hours as a pigeon slowly built a nest on a crumbling gutter, Dick knew that never in this world could he have given Paul a different answer, but the other worlds pushed in on him anyway, pale ghosts swimming in his mind, preventing him registering very much about the reality he’d been dealt.

“For example, the tunnel we built out of Laufen was fifty-four foot in total...” Pat Grant said.

Dick’s mind reeled with surprise before he consciously processed the information, and the twitch of interest dragged his attention, pulled him forward in his chair; he was sitting in the British quarters, listening to men plot escapes, with a tinny broadcast of a translation of Hitler’s most recent Nuremburg Address filtering in through the open window.

It’s the first thing Dick can remember that was definitely said by Pat, and Pat had given him the first moment in Colditz since his arrival that he was really definite about.

It was probably the first thing a lot of the POWs noticed about Pat; the sight of the quiet, self-contained TA Captain who spent a lot of time studying things and taking notes, sitting there talking casually about fifty-odd feet of well-constructed, reusable tunnel that had come out precisely where it was supposed to.

“I was a Civil Engineer,” Pat reminded them, with a dryness in the face of some of the regulars’ incredulity that made Dick smile. “Anyway, as I’ve said, the primary issue is ensuring an adequate amount of structural stability given the limitations with our materials – I can go through the basic principles if you like.”

\- - -

Pat dealt in facts and figures, exuding a calm presumption that, having been captured, their next action would obviously be successful escape. For all his certainty of purpose, he didn’t seem very interested in making broad-reaching comments about ‘The Hun’ or ‘The Jerry’, or for that matter discussing the rights and wrongs of the Eton-Harrow cricket match of 1930. Logical reasons for Dick to seek more of his company, although in recalling it he can’t be certain it wasn’t Pat who sought him out, can’t be certain which one of them it was that first invited the other to a chess match – one of the few available pastimes in the early days - and when that had turned into lengthy conversation (although given how appalling Dick has always been at chess, he supposes he was probably instrumental in the latter).

The more he tries to search the memories, the more they wear thin and warp and change – Mohn appears years before he arrived, Simon has his stick months before he broke his ankle, Dick’s mind trying to fill in gaps he can’t be sure of and making an alarmingly inaccurate job of it. He can never remember all he’d like to of that time, because at that time it hadn’t seemed in any way special.

The next thing that sticks, that imprinted on him strongly, is the arrival of Colonel Preston, almost four months after his own. Partly, no doubt, because of how much furore came in that event’s wake.

And partly because of what Pat had said to him, or more specifically how he’d said it, when they were left alone in the Colonel’s quarters, Peter and Tim having stormed away with the energy born of poorly thought out conclusions.

“I don’t like it,” Pat said, decidedly, a ripple of disgust in his voice. “You’d think he was infectious.”

Dick had himself been thinking that some officers’ reactions were little short of childish; more than once over the preceding days of debate he’d rolled his eyes and then found himself meeting Pat’s gaze, reassured to see another man unconvinced.

For Pat to speak such dissidence from the majority aloud, however, drew them together, in some sense defined the two of them as having some private, shared existence. It was unexpectedly warming and Dick reflexively drew back from it – too reminiscent of Paul.

“But you said yourself, Pat; it’s frustrating not being able to talk to the Poles.”

Pat turned to him, frowning. “When on active duty did you ever wonder if obeying your orders was helpful? That’s for civilians and politicians to consider, and we’re not that. We could be, here, and some of us probably want to be, want to sit back and forget discipline entirely, and that would be the surest way of surrendering forever. If Colonel Preston wants to maintain order, I can only assume that’s not what he wants.”

Dick drew his coat closer around himself. Pat rarely spoke at such length or with such vigour; he did not enjoy the slight sense that in some way he had been found disappointing.

Because the thoughts still moved close to the surface of his mind, he found himself thinking suddenly of what Pat might have said to Paul, had Paul’s offer been put to him, and this made him grin.

Then he thought about what Pat might say if he knew Dick had ever been in a position to get such an offer, particularly if he knew why.

“You’re shivering even with your coat,” Pat observed, the gentleness back in his voice. “We should go back to the dorm and find you a blanket.”

In the matter of Colonel Preston, Pat had, of course, turned out to be right. Over the two weeks of near-constant Appells that followed in the wake of the proving of this fact, Dick began to notice a subtle but interesting change in the attitude of Tim Downing and quite a few of the others. There were no more remarks about ‘jumper up Terriers’ and rather more mingling in the courtyard, but something beyond that too, some kind of deference to Pat that hadn’t been there before.

Several men wanted to talk to Pat throughout each day now, mostly on escape matters although they came with a surprising amount of other questions as well.

“Do you have time to fit me in?” Dick asked, smiling, as Pat came to sit next to him on the canteen window ledge one day about a week later. “Have we at last run out of men wanting the crash course in ‘Tunnelling Without Tears’?”

Pat rolled his eyes. “One is tempted to make a very unkind remark about why the mothers of certain boys might have wanted them to join the Army rather than risk them anywhere near an institute of higher learning. Or maybe it’s the Army’s fault, the way they think. But how could it be? You’ve survived with most of your brain it seems.”

Dick grinned; he was suddenly feeling rather happy, it was a strange and unusual sensation, as if some anxiety he hadn’t been aware of had been lifted. Then he affected a stern expression: “If you’re not going to distinguish between the Army and Navy, I’m not sure I can be seen with you.”

Pat groaned and gave him a shove, almost landing him on the ground. Dick righted himself, feeling a surge of unaccustomed energy, and ran away across the yard to join the ever-present football game for a few minutes, looking back now and again to see Pat sitting, arms crossed, smoking and watching the change of the guard at the gateway.  

\- - -

November became December and the first snow began to fall, and out in the exercise compound, with the pine forest stretching in every direction and the thin red light of winter sun, you could believe yourself to be in a story by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Only of course, those always end with someone dying tragically, so perhaps I shouldn’t make the comparison,” Dick pointed out to Pat as they walked together, crunching through the drifts from one group of officers to the next as Pat organised a makeshift choir for Christmas entertainment. “I think he would have liked ‘Christmas in the POW Camp’, though. The season of home and family, and everyone stuck here in a cold castle. Yes, throw in a desperate, unrequited love and he’d just about lap it up.”

Pat raised an eyebrow and paused a moment to scribble something on his list. “It will probably make us more homesick, in a way, to mark Christmas,” he agreed, having as usual picked up Dick’s meaning as well as his words. “But I can’t help feeling we’ll regret it if we don’t. Mind you, I’m one to speak - I spent my last two Christmases trying to concoct some plausible emergency to take me away from my brother-in-law’s house.”

“Ah, you see, Lord Haw-Haw is correct: Hitler is here to meet your every need.”

“If you think I’m too old to put a snowball down your shirt, you’re quite wrong.”

“Too old?” Dick laughed. He’d never thought of Pat as old – older than him, but then more or less everyone in Colditz came under that heading. He was going to make a joke, but Pat was for some reason flushing and he swallowed it, saying instead: “Yes, you’re right. Christmas needs that sense of... of gemütlichkeit.”

“What’s that then?” They were standing still now, facing each other, and Pat was blowing on his hands – there had been gloves in the Red Cross parcels, but not enough to go round, and Pat being Pat he had said he’d do without. His skin was white with cold and cracked over the knuckles, bleeding little tracks of crimson.

Dick took his own gloves off and handed them over, putting his hands in his pockets, waving away Pat’s protests and pressing on with the conversation.

“It doesn’t really translate – it means something like ‘warm, cosy time’. That feeling of having your toes by the fire and people you love around you when it’s cold outside. We can have that here as well as anywhere – at least, we’ve certainly got the cold.”

Pat was looking at him strangely, with something a little softer than his usual amused smile. It lasted only just long enough for Dick to notice, before a businesslike expression superseded it. “The cold, we certainly have. And this reminds me – I wanted to talk to you about you teaching me some German.”

“For escaping, I take it? Or are you just keen to read Kraft-Ebbing in the original?”

He could have bitten his tongue to keep the last sentence in. All too recently he’d moved in a world where at times every other joke seemed to involve some aspect of that particular German psychiatrist’s oeuvre, and the terms were bandied around like pet names, defanged snakes. Pat might not find it so amusing.

He respected Pat. He did not want to discover him to be the kind of man who blanched at mere peculiarities of taste.

But fortunately Pat seemed oblivious to the reference and tolerant of the facetiousness. “I know it’ll take a while, but I learnt the basics to help with the reading for my degree, as it happens, so I won’t be starting from scratch. The conversations I imagine having in Leipzig whilst escaping, however, are not about load-bearing and ratio co-efficients. Cigarette?”

“Depends, how many have you got left?”

“Half a packet.”

Dick drew one out and lit it, took a drag, then held it out: “They’ll last longer if we share.”

Pat took it from him and, passing it back and forth, they walked on together through the snow.

When Christmas had come, it had been all Dick had anticipated and slightly worse. After they’d been herded to the chapel for a dismal service, shared with some of the German command staff, the men seemed divided between those who were determined to be jolly or die trying – quite possibly by pickling themselves in the products of the Polish still – and those who skipped straight to deep intoxication.

Bu there had been some effort to give them improved rations and with the carefully hoarded bounty of the Red Cross parcels there was something like a festive meal, after which had come the brief entertainment. Pat had chosen well, old songs that everyone more or less knew, nothing too poignant but just right for a gentle melancholy on a quiet evening, sitting around wrapped in every piece of clothing they could lay hands on, alcohol, winter chill and shared emotion letting the men get closer in every sense than they might normally permit themselves.

Standing towards the back of the room, Dick leant against the door frame and watched. He’d been quite unaffected himself, until the chapel service had asked them all to unite in ‘Stille Nacht’. It had been one of his mother’s favourites, and every year his father had played it once, standing by the gramophone staring into the spinning shellac, before slipping the record carefully back into its pristine tissue sleeve.

He was in Germany, but a Germany he scarcely recognised, neither free nor happy. In a room full of lonely men, all of them blind to the solace they could offer each other.

He’d never thought of himself as a sybarite, but he’d never before gone so long without being touched, never understood how many ways there were to ache for it.

Eventually, he saw Pat coming across the room in his direction, and found himself ducking away, leaving the dorm and climbing the spiral stairs towards the locked door at the top that, months later, would become the library. There he stood, in the cold and the dark, breathing too fast, fighting an emotion he could barely categorise. He’d sworn to himself then and there that, whatever it took, he would not be spending his next Christmas in this place.

It had been at some point in the next few days that Pat had taken him aside and told him about his plan for the canteen tunnel.

\- - -

As 1941 began the temperature dropped again, until the overcoats became as fixed as tortoise-shells, the men sleeping and rising in them and never washing more than their faces with the water one had to break through ice to reach in the morning. After the first Appell had been endured, many of them would simply get back into bed again and lie under all their meagre covers, reading or sewing or writing letters home.

Pat was tunnelling most of every night now, and although Dick’s appetite rose in the cold alongside everyone else’s, he tried to give Pat some of his ration each day. With their diets now augmented courtesy of the Red Cross, he had in any case been finding that, not preoccupied with his stomach, he was yet more beset by the other basic urges of the human being. 

Almost every night, he was dreaming. Vivid, lucid dreams that left him clasping at air. He dreamed of Paul, of January ’33 when they’d gone skiing together and hidden under the trees near the chalet, kissing cold lips. Of the others, of so many others, the parade of handsome faces inviting him closer with the merest incline of the head, all so simple and so satisfying.

Until one awoke - sweating, aching, and alone.

There was a French officer who was notorious for the ‘comforting’ services he offered for a few cigarettes. Dick watched him surreptitiously in the courtyard one day before abandoning the idea; no matter how slight the fee, he didn’t want a transaction.

Other things did go on. Pairs or sometimes small groups of men indulging in shared, panting practices he remembered laughing at whilst at school; how ridiculous to pretend it was a contest, or some measure of manliness, or even that you didn’t care. Once or twice he would become aware of another man’s gaze on him and realise that at that moment he had a chance at more solace than his own hand, and some imitation of what he wanted.

But ersatz sex, like ersatz coffee, was likely to be essentially disappointing, even if it did warm you up for a few minutes. He had nothing against women, but he had no wish to be someone’s substitute for one.

“Hey Pat,” he’d murmur sometimes in the morning, in a tone that told everything. “I’ve had another dream.”

“Are they slipping something in your soup?” Pat would answer, laughing, or something equally teasing, as if the whims of the flesh were something he’d left behind when he shed his school uniform.

So Dick gave his rations to Pat as much as Pat would allow him to, and kept his dreams as far as possible of food.

Then there had been the other taunting fantasy, that of escape. Pat reckoned for the tunnel being complete in early March, and Dick would lie planning the itinerary in his head, calculating just how soon he might be in London, first to eat the best meal one could get served in wartime and then to slake his remaining thirsts.

Or perhaps, he sometimes thought, he’d take Pat out. Show him some sights – he said he’d barely ever been to London. It might be rather pleasant, to keep Pat’s company.

In the end, though, the Kommandantur trip on the day of the security conference was the only time Dick ever set foot in that particular tunnel; weeks later, it would turn out to encounter a solid stone foundation along its intended route. Some would say, perhaps, that enabling that escapade justified the tunnel in and of itself. At the time it had certainly felt fantastical, to be lying on the floorboards of a Kommandantur attic, listening unimpeded to the conversation in the room below and only struggling to try and keep what he’d heard clear and straight in his mind.

At first he’d been humming with adrenaline, but as the four hours passed he’d become relaxed, scarcely worrying about the return journey. He and Pat had said they could get here and so they had; they were powerful, unstoppable, if they wanted something they could achieve it, and never mind the Wehrmacht thinking otherwise. They were going to be free; he felt drunk with the conviction.

Pat lay on his stomach next to him, and now and again – as the conference below paused for petty argument or self-congratulation – Dick turned his head and smiled, glowing with the sense of invincibility and almost fiercely proud of Pat, who could make tunnels appear exactly as he planned them.

By the time the conference finally ended it was late evening, the attic illuminated only by pale moonlight and increasingly cold. Dick moved a chilled-stiff hand with a wince and prodded Pat’s arm, trying to communicate as silently as possible.

Pat sat up and Dick followed, stretching his muscles. He was aware of Pat leaning towards him, then Pat’s mouth very close to his ear, barely whispering.

“We should wait another half an hour, I think.”

Dick shivered - to traverse the tunnel they’d only worn a few layers, and that could account for it.  Rubbing at his arms briskly, he turned slightly, trying to make out Pat’s expression in the darkness, feeling Pat’s breath warm against his cheek and lips. Then came a closer warmth, and then the taste, the press of Pat’s mouth, familiar scent and familiar cigarettes and intense, blinding heat.

Dick pulled back, panting.

“Dick.” Pat’s voice, broken in a whisper.

His pulse pounded painfully hard in his throat; his whole body seemed to be one thrum of blood.

“Dick, I’m sorry.”Pat sounding urgent, almost desperate and Dick strained his eyes in the darkness; _he needed to see Pat’s face, needed to see this, you never saw Pat like this._

This is a well-thumbed memory; his mind has shown him Pat’s face here, in every expression he could want or fear, but the truth of it was, Dick couldn’t see it at all.

“Don’t worry, it was an accident.” Quite possibly, it was, he told himself. “We’re twitchy as hell. We’ll wait like you say, and then they bloody better have saved us some supper.”

They had to stay close to make themselves heard. They had, more or less, to breathe the words over each other, lips inches apart, and Dick knew that if Pat could see him, he would be able to see him trembling.

They waited, sitting apart, until Pat judged the time to have elapsed, and then at his signal made their stealthy way back to the tunnel entrance, being smuggled back into the British quarters just in time to leave them again for evening Appell. At no point did Pat meet his eyes. Later, Colonel Preston volunteered him to accept the post of Escape Officer, and Pat seemed to look everywhere else, to anyone’s expression but Dick’s, as he silently begged him to find some reasonable excuse.

Pat, being Pat, although faced with having to surrender all rights to try and escape himself, accepted.

That night, Dick heard him climbing out of their bunks. Across the room, with a grunt, Simon woke.

“Pat? You’re not still planning to dig?”

“Someone can still use that tunnel, and for now I know it best. Lock up after me.”

He left and Simon stumbled back to his bed. Dick lay, staring up at where Pat had been lying, reaching up to pick at the rough bed boards with his fingernail.

It was then, for the first time, that he began trying to remember how he’d first met Pat, what they’d said, who had been the one to push the friendship forward, whether in his growing realisation that he admired and respected Pat, he’d lost his awareness of something else.

His mouth tingled when he thought of it, and his skin flushed warm, and not just from awkwardness.

At some point he dozed, and the dreams came in a messy jumble, nothing helpful or obvious; a Bavarian mountainside in spring, himself running through the grass, free as a bird, towards some unknown goal, only to halt, terrified, as the ground ended, becoming a gaping chasm in the rock...

Startling awake, he realised the door was opening again, Pat just in the act of closing it behind himself.

Wincing at the cold air, Dick pushed his covers back and rolled out, waiting at the side of his bed as Pat slowly crossed the floor towards him.

“You’ll be bloody freezing,” Dick whispered, “and you need to sleep. Get in mine, it’s warm now, I’ll move up to yours for the rest of the night.”

For a minute Pat stared at him, silent, and then said, with every appearance of calm. “I’m afraid I may smell even worse than you’re used to; it’s not easy work.”

Dick shrugged, trying to match his casual ease, hoping that Pat could understand what he was trying to say. “I don’t mind, Pat. Listen, I don’t mind at all.”

“Go to bed and shut up!” someone murmured from further into the room. Dick grinned, and caught Pat’s eye. Pat was smiling too.

“Thank you.”

It was too cold to let the moment linger; Dick hauled himself onto the upper bunk and got under the covers as quickly as possible. In truth all the beds smelt after nearly a year of unchanged straw mattresses, and this one was rough and musky as the next man’s, and yet unmistakeably Pat’s.

He fell asleep rapidly, suffused with a strange, delightful warmth, and when he awoke it took a moment to remember why he was in the wrong bunk, and then to recall just how many things had now changed.

\- - -

“I do think this cold weather is simply awful, don’t you, Mr Player?”

Dick blinks at the girl standing on his left. She is pretty enough and quite young – perhaps this is her debutante season, poor thing. She’s smiling at him expectantly, as if his response is going to be illuminating and educational. They must have been introduced, but he can’t remember it; half his attention was on Pat as the currents of the crowd shifted him to a different group of people gathered near the buffet table.

Simon Carter has arrived, sporting a full beard. He looks thin and pale, even for him, and he has collared Pat who is now talking to him, nodding at whatever he’s saying.

There had been a time when Dick went to every party the Riveria could hold and then a few more, and once he used to fly around these things, flitting from one group to another and laughing and loving it. You didn’t talk so much as sparkle, find a few witty jokes and the knowledge of your own beauty and invincibility, and people called you the life and soul.

Was that what they all got wrong, in the Thirties? Parties, when they should have looked outside and been serious?

Every gathering he’s been to since the war ended, he’s stayed with one or two people, or better yet on his own. Some part of him now rebels at putting so much energy into something so unnecessary as having people you barely know like you.

“The weather? Very cold, yes.” He smiles at the girl as best he can. He used to rather enjoy flirting with girls – at the parties he went to, everyone would understand that flirtation was only polite and everyone had to be considered fair game, don’t be old-fashioned, darling.

“They say it’s even colder than it was in ’41,” she replies, with a kind of grim determination. “I remember the snow that year – at school they let us take one Prep session for sledging and then there was cocoa. Well, something like cocoa anyway. Do you suppose we’ll have real cocoa again soon, Mr Player?”

She’s clearly a nice girl and he doesn’t want to have to give in to the desire to shake her, so gives in to another one, mutters an excuse about getting her some food and wanders away in the direction of the buffet table. He can hear the conversation in the circle of people Pat’s standing with.

“...but I think that’s wonderful, Mr Grant,” a woman is saying.

“Stuff and nonsense!” A male voice barks back. Dick turns from his collection of cold chicken pieces and sees a man in dress uniform, not a POW he knows personally and judging by his age probably not a combatant in the last war at all. “Working in India? After what the blighters did? They had another of their precious mutinies in the middle of the damn war! Exhibit no kind of respect for the British Crown and then want to be handed their independence on a plate.”

Pat’s face has the especial blankness he wears when he finds whoever he’s speaking to scarcely worthy of being dignified with a response, but answers in a measured voice. “Since we have just returned independence to Austria, Czechoslovakia, France and several others and commended ourselves for it, I admit I can see their reasoning in raising the issue. But I am not making a political statement. A friend of mine who is involved in an engineering project to improve irrigation in coastal Andhra has asked for my help and I’m more than happy to give it to him.”

The woman is looking nervous now, glancing at the uniformed man who is still frowning and then back at Pat. “But isn’t it frightfully dangerous there at the moment, with all the protests and so on?”

Pat raises an eyebrow. “Two years ago, to have stood in this part of London at this time of night was considered impossibly dangerous. But here we are now. Improvement requires effort. Besides,” he looks at the man he has offended, and Dick can almost see him making the considered choice not to be diplomatic, “I was born in India, I lived there till I was ten. It is a wonderful place and I miss it a great deal.”

The officer snorts. “Well, it’s not what it was thirty years ago.”

Pat turns to look at him. “Neither am I.” The words are innocent enough, but the steel behind them and something in Pat’s gaze seem to make the man think better of replying.

“And what are you doing now that we have peace, Mr Player?”

Dick jumps and realises that the woman, in her desperation, is addressing him, and the group has opened up to let him in.

He coughs. Pat is looking at him now, surprise on his face. Maybe he thought Dick had left. Maybe he hoped he had.

"I know what Captain Grant means,” he says, slowly. “We spent so long in the war, as POWs, trying to get out and trying to get back and yet somehow, ‘back’ isn't where we want to be."

She smiles encouragingly, clearly desperate to nurture this alternative conversation. “And where do you want to be, Mr Player? Shall you be leaving us too?”

“Honestly I haven’t quite decided.” He swallows. “I will say this for the war – it made some decisions a lot easier. You couldn’t think about what you wanted, just about what you ought to do. Now we’re people again and we can have what we want, and we have to find out what that is. I dare say I’m repeating myself, but that is the crux of the matter, discovering what one actually wants, and somehow in the process, I suppose, who one really is.”

He raises his eyes. Pat is still looking at him. Nearby, Simon and a few other men are nodding, but Pat isn’t moving.

Dick is suddenly very aware of the sickly pleasing tug of Charles’ bruises on his hipbones. Some mad part of him, railing against the incarceration in all these layers of formality and inoffensiveness, wants to snap out: “The Secret Service want to send me to the Russian sector of Berlin to seduce my oldest friend, but that’s alright, he did threaten to have me killed once and we’ve always had very satisfying fucks.”

He has a feeling Bill Haydon would laugh approvingly at that – not at communicating that particular information, of course, but the spirit of the thing. Men like Haydon crawled through the underbelly of what others called a clean, just war and saw what happened in the darkness.

“There is no meaning,” Haydon had said to him, once, a night spent together in a basement that stank of cordite and frost-rotted hay, making explosives. “There’s no pattern, no justice. You have the power in your own life, that’s all.”

“And to the strongest will goes all the power?” Dick had asked, scathing. “I heard a speech a great deal like that in Berlin once.”

“He got the power, though, didn’t he?” Haydon had answered, narrowing his dark eyes.

Dick puts down his plate, raising his hand to his head. He’s tired, he feels sick, he should have eaten before this and now his stomach is churning pit of acid and his thoughts are light and spinning.

“Excuse me,” he murmurs, “I’m just going to...”

Grabbing a bread roll and a large piece of cheese and not caring about the gasps this produces, he somehow makes his way back across the room, heading out through the doors towards the sharp, clear air outside. He’s being rude, but he can’t do this. He can’t stand and make small talk like he’s a character in a Jane Austen novel, and find ways to say something that there aren’t words for, as if the worst thing a man can do is give offence to some strangers.

He thought that if he saw Pat he would find that after all, it had not been so important, that Pat didn’t matter anymore, but he does and it hurts and now Dick’s going to escape, because he can, because that’s what he’s always done.

\- - -

“I have to get out of here,” he said to Pat, and it needed saying even though it was obvious, because at least saying it released _something_.

Pat had been Escape Officer for two months, spring had come and morale had risen, and Dick privately thought Pat’s leadership might have aided that even more than the warm weather.

There had never been any discussion between them about the day of the conference.

If only they weren’t stuck together, Dick might have asked, have risked questions. But then if they weren’t stuck together, he was sure the situation would not have arisen. Come to that, if it weren’t for Colditz, they would probably never even have met. Pat was not the sort of person invited to parties by the sort of people Dick knew.

Spring and a young man’s heart turns to thoughts of love, and indeed when Dick recalled that time it seemed as if all the men were constantly going on about their wives and girlfriends, or that one night stand with the usherette from the cinema, or even just girls in pictures and photographs, which was of course in reality all any of them had to hand. George Brent could do a reasonable sketch of any starlet you cared to ask for, and was getting a nice little trade out of it.

Sometimes it entertained Dick to tell stories picked up during his time with the Berlin _beau monde_ – enough involved women to make them popular. There was a perverse pleasure in seeing the frustration he could bring to the men’s faces, especially with one particular tale about a movie actress and her jar of cold cream.

Pat was entirely silent on the subject. He barely ever spoke about his personal history, and Dick caught himself sometimes in elaborate imaginings on the subject – a childhood sweetheart who married another? A fiancée who died young? Had Pat simply never found a girl he liked?

“Hard to imagine Pat even has one, isn’t it?” Tim had laughed one evening over a game of cards, gesturing between his legs in case his meaning wasn’t quite clear.

“Not everyone has to get it out and measure it when they introduce themselves,” Dick snapped back. “And you’re not a child, say ‘cock’ if you damn well want to.” Then he bit his lip, before he could push beyond what Tim might manage to ignore in the cause of a quiet life: “Your turn.”

“I have to get out of here,” he said to Pat again. They were sitting on the canteen window ledge in the courtyard, watching a brave attempt to recreate the Eton Wall Game. “I can feel this lethargy setting into my mind, this sheer uselessness. Today I woke up and it felt normal to be here. And I feel guilty because it’s not like I miss anyone in particular or anyone needs me, not like Simon or the others. I mean, I’ve been longer here, now, than I’ve been in any lodging since I left Dartmouth, it might as well be home. But I still don’t want to be here.”

Pat kept his eyes direct ahead on the game. Dick had thought he’d express some sympathy of feeling but his response was only: “Then find a way and tell me about it.”

“Aren’t there any schemes already going on?”

Pat stood up, stubbing his cigarette under his heel, and faced him. “Have you looked at this place? There are at least fifty ways to get out that I can think of, but none of them useable unless you put the work into it, have every angle studied for days and have some clue what to do once you’re past the wall. You want to fight lethargy, you start thinking.”

It was more like anger than anything Pat had ever directed at him, and Dick bridled under it, already twitching with frustration.

Pat walked away from him, over the courtyard and back upstairs, and Dick threw himself into the Wall Game, pushing and shoving every man who came in sight until finally he clobbered someone irritable enough to fight back; they fell to the ground, punching and wrestling until the guards pulled them apart, and Dick was panting, exhausted and still almost desperate.

In the seven days solitary it won him, he made himself think. There was a certain peace in being alone, something he had not understood before Colditz. It made him think of the ocean, of lying on a boat with no other living beings in sight.

It was then that he had thought of his friends in St Tropez. With the idea came energy, distraction, purpose; he began figuring out what he would need for navigation.

\- - -

It transpired that Simon Carter had come up with a strong-sounding plan to get out via the exercise yard punch-bag, which was only lacking any kind of scheme to get back to England afterwards. It took no time to get him to agree to join forces, not that it was ever usually difficult to get Simon on board with anything promising equal parts adventure and risk.

Dick began to wonder, as they spent time together over the next weeks, if Simon had proposed to his wife simply because he was afraid to do so, and maybe also because he’d been told he shouldn’t; it was quickly clear that they were from very different backgrounds.

And what a marriage – barely months together before Simon had been shot down. And Simon would keep going on about it; Dick felt sorry for him, certainly, but he couldn’t stand hearing it over and over, about how awful it had all been, about how wonderful she was, about how time passed so quickly when you were waiting to be separated from someone.

Dick might always have said with some feeling, “Thank god I’m not married”, but in talking to Simon he found more reasons for it; no one married was free. To bind yourself to another person – he’d found it a rather frightening idea.

They perfected their plan, Pat approved it, Dick escaped and had a brief, blessed period of walking freely in the world before stumbling into the Gestapo patrol who found a tiny error in his forged Ausweis. When they discovered that his meridian tables were not in fact, important espionage codes and he was only a local POW, they took out their frustration in a very direct manner. 

The subsequent twenty-eight days of solitary confinement did not seem as peaceful. Some time for reflection was pleasant; over a month you could wear a circular path through your psyche quicker than the floorboards and become all too aware of what you were missing the most.

“I shouldn’t say it’s good to see you again, exactly,” Pat said to him in greeting on his return. “But all the same, it is good to see you again, Dick.”

Pat could always make him grin.

The traditional ‘out of solitary’ slap-up meal had been prepared for him, including a small pile of Bournville chocolate squares swimming in condensed milk, heated in the tin over a single candle flame to reach a lovely sticky mess. Dick licked his lips and sighed, and then laughed at Pat’s expression as he offered him a cigarette.

After a few drags, he passed it back to Pat. The tip was marked and sticky with chocolate, but Pat took it anyway and as the others dispersed to their various activities, they sat for a while in silence, watching the candle burn, fingertips brushing now and then, passing the taste between them.

  _Gemütlichkeit_ , Dick’s brain supplied.

\- - -

Now it was warmer, it was possible and desirable to wash somewhat more thoroughly and often.

Since he and Pat had a tendency to go about together, and since prison camp living tended to strip even the gentlest modesty, Dick knew no one would remark them bathing at the same time.

From the perspective of eking out rations, soap benefited from being shared as much as cigarettes, providing you knew the other person well enough to feel comfortable with it, and if this meant standing naked next to Pat as they lathered up, then that was a good thing, because Pat would know Dick felt no awkwardness in it. Nudity was not, in fact, something that had ever made him self-conscious.

He was, perhaps, a little surprised that Pat didn’t appear to be affected by it at all, but he reminded himself that that was the point of the exercise and certainly not a cause for irritation.

\- - -

Dick’s next escape lasted longer, and took an even greater toll.

The memory of most of it - of fear, frustration, hopelessness - comes back to him in stark, nightmarish scenes like the darkest swirls of some Expressionist painting; it’s never been something he’s wanted to recall.

Standing in the Colditz courtyard, despair sapping at his strength alongside the licking flame of fever, he became aware of Pat approaching him; that’s where he lets the memory begin, with the strange, soothing sliver of comfort he’d felt then.

“We’ll get to you,” Pat was hissing, standing right by his side, close enough to touch, and Dick struggled not just to collapse, to grab Pat’s shoulders and fall into him, because he was tired, oh so very, very tired.

In solitary, he lay on a bed that seemed sometimes to be rocking, sometimes to be burning up around him. Words swam over him – pneumonia, pleurisy, pyrexia, phlegm, Prontosil. He coughed and coughed till he choked, and burrowed into the sheets seeking a cool place for his head, confused as to how after so long so wet, and so cold, he could now be so desperate for water. Dark clouds rolled over him, red and black rain, blood and bile and pain stabbing through him. Feverish visions marched past; death’s head skulls on a whore’s china dolls.

“You’re not real and I won’t believe you,” he told Pat, who had materialised beside him and was sitting in a chair looking solid, because of course the trickiest hallucinations would do that.

“You don’t have to believe anything, just do as you’re told,” Pat replied. “Now drink this.”

A tin cup was at his mouth, and Dick sipped eagerly, holding Pat’s assisting hand in his own, before recoiling at the bitter taste.

“No, drink.” Pat was raising the cup again. “It’s medicine. It’s keeping your fever down.”

Dick frowned but obediently drained the rest, studying Pat’s face over the rim of the cup; he really did look real, though not quite as Dick remembered. Unshaven, for start - for the last several days at least - and not in his usual uniform.

“Pat?” The liquid had scarcely soothed his throat and he coughed. “How long have you been here?”

Before the answer could come, a fit of coughing wracked him. Pat helped him to sit up and get a handkerchief to his mouth as his lungs heaved inside him, aching and raw. Once he lay back again, exhausted, Pat rose and carried the cup to a sink in the corner, which Dick could not understand as none of the solitary cells had any such luxuries. Having wiped the cup, Pat went to a table bearing an assortment of bottles and boxes and refilled it with something that proved to be Red Cross canned orange juice, so delicious and sweet that Dick was nearly distracted from his question.

“How long, Pat? What happened to me?”

“You need to tell me that, eventually.” Pat was sitting in the chair again, cradling the cup in his fingers. “I should never have let you go with such an unprepared, risky scheme, without a fully organised route, without enough money even...” He shook his head, shutting his eyes for a moment.

Dick pushed himself up into a sitting position, not caring that it made his head spin. “How long?”

Pat’s voice as he answered was calm enough, but in his hands the cup twisted back and forth almost violently. “You got back a month ago. The Doc thought the pneumonia wasn’t so bad at first, but you got worse instead of better. He believes that after such a protracted infection, in the state of malnutrition you were in, you may have developed an abscess. Enough to give you blood poisoning, anyway.”

The cup had stopped moving. Pat was staring down at it, and there was a small pause before he spoke again. “It was about three weeks ago that they agreed for you to be moved here to the infirmary wing. You’d started coughing blood, the German medico was terrified you had TB and insisted on this isolation room and a volunteer to look after you from among the British to reduce the risk of cross-infection.”

Leaning back on his elbows, Dick closed his eyes. “And you’ve been...” He flushed, thinking of everything illness entailed, and gave into the impulse to lie flat again, trying to pull the covers back around himself.

Pat leant over and helped him. There was a smile on his face now, though Dick could see, as he studied it from closer to, the dark smudges under his eyes. “Your fever finally broke two nights ago, and since then you’ve mostly been asleep.” Pat paused, and chuckled: “I shouldn’t say it’s good to see you again, exactly, but, well, it is good to see you again.”

Through the embarrassment and confusion, Dick found himself smiling back. He took Pat’s hand where it rested on the bed and gripped it once, firmly, in his own. “Thank you.”

“I won’t have anyone dying as a result of one my escape plans,” Pat replied sternly, standing up again. “Now, how about some of what the canteen thinks passes for soup?”

Dick was still nodding as he drifted back to sleep.

Pat stayed another week with him, sleeping on the floor, administering his medicines and assisting with anything else Dick needed. Half of the time, Dick could still believe it was a dream, so weak and strange he felt, and that he would wake up in the damp hovel in Vienna, to schnitzel and stolen pastries and the scent of cheap perfume overlaying filth of every kind.

It was a relief, realising he was in Colditz, and if that was unsettling, he was too exhausted to care.

Pat talked to him; that is what Dick primarily remembers of that time, and the part he revisits most often. Pat, sitting in his chair, fiddling with a spoon or a twist of paper since in deference to Dick’s cough neither of them were smoking, staring into the distance and telling stories from his childhood in India, of fantastic beasts and exotic landscapes Dick knew only from Kipling, of a British existence belonging to another century, doggedly hanging on till the last man’s last gin-and-tonic.

Pat never usually spoke of his own past, but as Dick asked then, eager for understanding, it slowly came; his time at university, his early career, his decision to join the Territorial Army and his brief, bloody war in France, ending in a communications breakdown that had left him and his unit manning an obsolete anti-tank rifle in the face of three heavily-armoured panzer divisions. Dick had heard from others captured from the British Expeditionary Force about the horror of the eastward prisoner marches, but in Pat’s cool, precise words, for the first time he let himself feel it.

Pat’s lowered his eyes as he spoke about it, of what he had seen, of what had been done, to him and so many others. Once, Dick actually raised a hand to pause him, troubled.

“You don’t have to tell me, Pat. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked.”

Pat took his hand and squeezed it briefly, and placed it back on the bed before letting go. “No. It’s good to tell someone. It’s good to have someone to tell.”

As the next month passed, and Dick, declared not to be tubercular and well on the road to recovery, was moved to the normal infirmary ward, he began to understand that Pat, sensing his embarrassment, had consciously offered some vulnerability of his own.

The knowledge gave him a strange, tight, pleased feeling in his chest, made him smile privately into his pillow. The palliasse escape had been a failure, had almost cost him his life, and yet he struggled to wish with any conviction that events had gone in any other way.

\- - -

On his return to the British quarters, Dick was rather relieved to find that recent incidents amongst the Poles prevented him being the only item of news. Nonetheless, once word had got about that he’d spent most of his nights away sleeping in the bed of a Viennese prostitute, the clamour for stories had begun.

“I’ve said already, I was ill,” Dick told the room for the third or fourth time, sighing and squinting at the hole he was trying to mend in the seam of his jersey. “And she was very kind, and very young.”

He closed his eyes, wincing, trying not to wonder what had happened to her,  or what she’d thought of him when she’d found him gone.

“Yes, but just to _see_ a woman,” someone muttered, to a chorus of chuckles.

Dick put down his sewing and walked deliberately across the room to where Pat was seated, making careful drawings with a home-made set of parallel rulers.

“Your latest project?” Dick asked quietly. He’d been aware since his return of how carefully Pat was giving him space, waiting for Dick to seek his company rather than simply approach him. Only Pat, being Pat, would regard having nursed someone back from the brink of death as a potential imposition, and Dick wanted to hug him for it.

He was aware always, now, of some thrill of warmth and happiness when he went to Pat’s side. In an environment where any novel sensation was wonderful, it was entirely intoxicating.

Pat looked up at him. “Tunnelling without tears,” he agreed, smiling. Then, looking round at the groups of men, many of whom were still talking, loudly, about what they themselves would do stuck in bed with a lady of the evening, pneumonia or no pneumonia, he raised an eyebrow. “Fancy a stroll?”

Dick nodded, but - once the door of the dormitory had closed behind them - took Pat’s arm to lead him up the stone stairs and into the room they now called ‘The Library’, for all there were precious few volumes and most of them permanently in circulation.

“Peace,” he groaned, leaning back against the door. “Hope you don’t mind, Pat, but half the chaps are down in the courtyard and they’ll only be the same and I can’t...”

“It doesn’t hurt her, you know, them talking,” Pat said gently. “And what you’ve done helps them, makes them believe it’s possible to get out, to run a few rings round the enemy. I think some of the latest arrivals are a little in awe of you, actually.” He sat down, perched on the wide wooden table in the centre of the room, and Dick came to sit next to him, resting his feet on a chair in precisely the way his teachers had always told him not to.

“When do we start digging, then?”

“We start digging on Monday. _You_ start digging when and only when the Doc says you’re well enough.”

“I am well, Pat.” Dick twisted to face him. In his mind this had seemed complicated, but then and there it was easy; for him this kind of thing always had been, but this, more than anything he could recall, felt so utterly and entirely _supposed_.

“I am well,” he said again, taking Pat’s hand in his, leaning in to whisper, the whole of him tingling with what he knew he was about to do, delighting in the reflection of it he could see in Pat’s eyes. “You made me well and I’m here now. I’m with you.”

The last words he barely breathed against Pat’s lips before kissing him.

His taste, his scent, the way he breathed, even the way his lips moved as he smiled, were all beautifully familiar, and yet it felt like nothing Dick had ever experienced before.

“You really... want this?” Pat murmured as they parted, gasping. Then he laughed. “Perhaps it’s stupid question, but as long as you understand you don’t have to...”

“I have to,” Dick interrupted, nodding firmly. “Oh believe me, I have to.” He kissed him again, opening his mouth against Pat’s, hearing with pleasure Pat’s surprised murmur as he did so.

\- - -

More surprising to Dick than the things that changed between them, were the things that didn’t.

They still talked together, and still didn’t need to talk, half the time, to communicate. They still spent time apart and still smiled when they were reunited. They still lay in their bunks, passing cigarettes between them, and if now the gesture felt like more, Dick wondered if it was only that he knew now what it had always meant. Pat’s fingers grazing his as their hands met had made his skin tingle for so long he couldn’t really recall a time before it.

He’d had episodes like this in years gone by, pleasant holiday romances filling idle days with looks and touches of suddenly imperative importance, culminating usually in triumph, conquest and a new anecdote with which to regale Paul.

None of them had been men he’d struggled to remember, and if now the memories seemed pale and unimportant, probably that was why.

None of them had been men he’d struggled to leave, other than in the necessary effort of polite excuses, and since in this case even that was not likely to be required, perhaps that was why he felt for once no impulse to wish for separation.

After all, Pat was still the Escape Officer, and unable to leave, and Dick was still high up on the escape list.

Dick told himself at the time that he would have taken his chance and made a run for it on the way back from his trip to the town dentist, had he not overheard such an exploitable conversation. But some things, after all, had changed, and in honesty he could not help but notice them.

Pat’s expression as he’d come back through the courtyard that day had been a study in control, but all the same he’d barely been able to tear his eyes off him and Dick hadn’t done much better, keeping his hands fisted inside his pockets to stop himself reaching out. Never mind walking away from Pat - he could barely keep from kissing him.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Pat had said after Dick explained he had new information, but without exchanging a word they’d known to keep climbing, past the dorm and on to the library, to the shielded corner behind some old timbers, to Dick finally freeing his hands and grabbing, to Pat pressing him into the wall, kissing him fiercely, gripping his shoulders so hard it hurt.

Dick never taught Pat to bite him, Pat found that for himself, apologising at first, then becoming wide-eyed and gorgeously breathless as Dick happily demonstrated that, no really, he did like it.

With other lovers Dick had gone slowly simply to fill time, whereas with Pat there was always the possibility of no time being left at all, and yet slow they had still been. Dick had no real idea of the extent of Pat’s experience, or whether he fully guessed his own; as with everything between them, there seemed to be some natural pace they both knew, and both shared.

That day, in the thrill of reunion, with the coming escape looming mere days away, Dick had pressed a little further than before. It was the first time that Dick was able to see the way Pat looked at the moment of climax; mouth open in a soundless cry, Dick gently slowing the motion of his hand and then nuzzling at his throat, breathing him in.  

Afterwards Pat flushed, lowering his eyes, and Dick kissed him with a surge of feeling that almost hurt as it rolled through him.

“I shouldn’t say it’s good to see you, really...” Dick murmured, grinning, and finally Pat met his gaze, shaking his head in exasperation at him even as he smiled.

“But it is good to see you,” they chorused together, chuckling.

Since there was no imaginable way Dick could avoid taking his rightful place in the canteen tunnel escape, he didn’t let himself think about it, or at least when he did, he comforted himself with the thought that if it worked, all the other officers might soon follow.

Another failure later, and with the added edge from yet another twenty-eight days of solitary confinement, when he finally saw Pat again he couldn’t resist the impulse, even in the middle of quarters, to grab him in his arms and hug him close, basking in the heat of his body and the comfort of his scent, couldn’t help the nagging voice that wondered if he was even happier to see him than he would have been to see Switzerland.

\- - -

“Perhaps we are civilians now,” Dick said, trying to turn his back against the wind and pulling his hat more firmly over his ears; knitting caps had become the latest fad to sweep through the castle and everyone was reaping the benefit.

Simon raised an eyebrow. “Yes, that’s what I told Ullman but strangely he didn’t let me through the gates... What on Earth are you on about now?”

 Dick shrugged. They were pacing the length of the exercise compound for the millionth, maybe ten-millionth time, it was their second November behind bars and the prospect of another Christmas in Colditz had Pat occupied with organizing what would this year be a far bigger undertaking, thanks to the greatly swelled ranks of prisoners.

“Just something Pat said, back when we arrived. About choosing to stay soldiers – well, combatants, you know what I mean – or becoming civilians and settling in.”

“That’s not how I’d describe us. Why, you and me, and Phil maybe, we’ve tried harder than anyone to get out of this place.”

“I’m not denying it. But it’s been eighteen months, hasn’t it? And look at us now – we know it’s too risky to try and run when it’s this cold, so we’re planning instead, planning for this to be part of our lives, not just an interruption to them.”

Simon bristled. “This is an interruption to my life - this whole bloody war is an interruption to my life! If I had a chance to run, right now, I’d take it, risk be damned!” He stopped, panting harshly, and groaned, running a hand over his face.

Dick took a deep breath, pushing away a fallen pine cone with his toe. “Listen, Simon. If they brought Cathy here – not... don’t think about how or what that would mean, just imagine she was captured somehow and here with you, and she couldn’t run. Would you still want to run so badly then?”

Simon looked up at him, frowning. Dick wondered if he understood exactly what he meant or whether he had no idea; Simon could be a strange mixture of perception and self-absorption.

“You know, I didn’t have to join the RAF. I didn’t have to stay flying operations – my father-in-law wanted to get me a job driving a desk, and he could have swung it alright. Cathy begged me not to keep going out. But I knew I had to, and underneath she knew it too.”

Dick raised an eyebrow: “You mean the old, ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not honour more’?”

Simon held his gaze. “No, that poem had it wrong. Never mind how much he loved her – could she love him, really, if he wasn’t ready to stick to his principles?”

\- - -

The Christmas of 1941 had been perceptibly more domestic than the one that had preceded it. After so long together, and with more resources than they had had before, all the men had contrived gifts for those they knew well, and there was more than one example, albeit with traditional British understatement, of deeper affection. Dick was intrigued to notice the beautifully carved chess set Tim had produced for Simon.

Sometimes he was astounded that there could be any kind of privacy in Colditz, but time and again it seemed that each of their own little self-absorptions granted them perhaps just enough obliviousness to the small triumphs and tragedies of everyone else.

Once again, he himself found the day agonising. Any such regular festival, forcing reflection, recollection of the passage of time, had the potential to be frustrating, and he found himself in a storm of conflicting feelings.

“What’s the matter?” Pat asked, having found him in the washroom, where he’d gone simply for some peace, and so as not to be invited to any more hands of cards or games of snakes and ladders. Retreating into the smallest space he could, he was sitting in one of the cubicles, smoking, and Pat stood just inside the door frame, frowning.

Dick shrugged, then wiped the back of his hand angrily over his eyes; it was infuriating, how composed one could be when no one cared, only to crumble if someone showed an interest.

“Just thinking about... I suppose about the two of us going through that tunnel to listen to the conference, back when old Ullman arrived.” He stubbed his cigarette against the porcelain. “We thought we’d be out before the end of spring.”

Pat frowned and reached down to grasp his shoulder. “I know it hurts you, being here. I should be trying to find a way out for you, I know that. I will try.”

Dick looked up at him, struggling to decide what would be the right thing to say, what it was that would remove that look of uncertainty and pain from Pat’s eyes.

Pat was the only man he knew who he’d easily call honourable. A good man, one of principle and determination. One of the best men he’d ever met. It seemed scarcely credible that he himself would not realise Dick saw that, would not see Dick’s need to be worthy of him.

Giving up on words, Dick simply kissed him, pushing the cubicle door shut over Pat’s shoulder and going to his knees, not caring how obvious it would be to anyone who walked into the room – these things happened, they had none of them exactly taken monastic vows. Pat’s hands tangled and twisted in his hair and Dick took him in further, trying to lose himself in the scent and the sensation, wishing he could have had this anywhere else, at any other time, or that he could still be the person he had been, who didn’t care about any of it.

Almost before he’d finished, Pat was pulling him up to kiss him, to reach for him; he still looked something close to frightened.

“I’ll find a way for you get out,” he murmured, and Dick, biting his own lips, pressed his face into Pat’s shoulder and nodded helplessly.

\- - -

Had it not been for the fiasco with MacDonald, things might have gone differently, but Dick was fully versed by that point in the uselessness of contemplating all the things that might have been.

“I prepare these men, I vet these plans, approve them – essentially give them orders - and back they come, injured and ill, and now a man’s been killed!”

Pat was pacing the floor of the library, having pushed his chair violently from the table where Dick had been out-lining his and Simon’s latest plan.

Of late Dick felt he understood Simon rather better. They both knew the plan was imperfect, but they both knew it stood a chance, and for their own, perhaps not so different reasons, undertaking it had become the only tolerable option. The initial scouting and preparation had occupied quite a lot of his time, limiting the part of the day he could spend in Pat’s company, and it had been almost a relief, because things between them felt so tangled now and he found himself constantly struggling not to say something he would most probably regret.

When they’d come up the stairs to talk, here to this place where so much had passed between them, Dick had felt a wave of unthinking desire, only to realise with an unsettling jolt that he wasn’t sure if Pat would welcome the approach, if he would prefer to stay with the matter in hand.

Since MacDonald had been shot, Pat had been increasingly businesslike and stern, taking himself off during the day to study various plans and proposals. Sometimes Dick saw that he had dozed off – he’d been sleeping badly for days, refusing to speak afterwards of nightmares so violent that the entire bunk shook, leaving Dick lying wakeful, wishing he had the courage to rise up and touch and soothe him.

As Pat paced now, Dick worried at how pale he was, longed to simply stand up and grab him, wrestle him if necessary, till he stilled and calmed in his arms and finally relaxed with him. When he remembered the scene later, he could never think of any compelling reason why he might have thought it was so impossible to do so.

“Do you understand?” Pat was continuing, increasingly agitated. “It’s just me and Colonel Preston who have that responsibility now – to know we can send a man to his death. I had enough of it following orders in France, long after all hope of any defensive action was lost, and then when the orders stopped coming, trying to decide whether to surrender, whether to make my men gamble on getting through to the beaches or make them become prisoners – _I_ made them prisoners in the end, I ordered the surrender.” He turned, reaching out his hands, grasping the air and sighing. “But that’s what being a soldier is, that’s what you have to do to do your duty, that’s why you’re not supposed to...”

He stopped, shaking his head, breathing hard. “This plan isn’t good enough and I won’t approve it.”

“But, Pat! We’ll never be able to get this information, we have to take the chance!” Dick did reach out his hand, simply to get him to turn and face him, and Pat drew back sharply as if the touch had pained him somehow.

He was composing himself again, regaining control; it would be hard to believe, now, the emotion that lay behind his words. “No. I said it isn’t good enough and that is my considered opinion as your Escape Officer, your senior officer and your friend. If you’re stuck in the middle of the Kommandantur courtyard with nowhere to run, because there’s no way out of this pit of yours – and there’s no earthly reason to think there is - they’re as likely to shoot you as ask questions.”

Dick sank down into his chair, resting his head forward onto his hands. “I can’t be in this place any longer, I can’t think, I can’t breathe.”

“And so if they shoot you, at least your problems are solved one way or another? And so therefore it shouldn’t trouble me? Perhaps you really think it wouldn’t.” Pat’s voice was so level that Dick scarcely registered it until he’d left, closing the door quietly and properly and making his way down the stairs.

Dick threw the empty chair across the room. It shattered into twelve pieces, and once he’d stopped staring blankly at them, he collected them carefully and smuggled them down to the dorm in his coat, in case they might come in handy.

\- - -

Events moved so quickly after that that Dick could scarcely keep track of them. He and Pat went round their arguments again, only just restrained by the presence of Simon and Colonel Preston, and Dick winced afterwards to think that he’d tried to go over Pat’s authority. Preston had certainly given him a filthy look for it.

Although no had approved or even thought twice about it, he helped put Simon in a tea chest, and Pat bawled them all out for it like the fools they were. All the order and respect, all the gentle but firm discipline that Dick had watched Pat establish so effortlessly two years ago was crumbling, and Dick couldn’t think what to do about it.

He had always thought himself experienced in relationships, in human interaction. Now he realised he had scratched the surface – over and over and over, more times than many, perhaps, but that was all.

Then, in the blink of an eye, between the opening and closing of Colonel Preston’s mouth, the pit escape was on after all, and Dick, given the choice of those eligible following Simon’s injury, picked Peter Muir to accompany him.

And, only after that, Pat suddenly became eligible for escape as well.

Dick could think of no way to suggest changing the assigned teams without saying more than was prudent. He wasn’t even sure if Pat would want him to. Since the escape had been approved, Pat had thrown himself into it with his old energy, almost obsessively focussed, ensuring each detail was in perfect order, getting all the prisoners into shape to help them; the morale had picked up, Pat’s mood had improved and Dick, reeling with the change of circumstances, already twisted into knots of guesswork, began to wonder if Pat was glad to be in sight of the end of their association.

After all, Pat was to escape now, to get back to the world and his normal life. More or less everything that had happened between them, had happened with Pat acting on the assumption that it would be years after Dick’s departure that he’d ever get to leave Colditz.  

That was how it had always been with them. The ever-present need to get away. The assumption, always, that they would leave each other.

As they planned together now for the escape, meeting always in the company of others, they had something like their old energy - they had always worked well together and it was nice just to be able to chat to Pat again, to make him laugh at terrible puns and enjoy being the first one to understand his thoughts.

Sometimes, Dick wondered if they were to allow themselves to be alone together, what might happen. But they were about to go their separate ways – or possibly, worse still, be rapidly recaptured and reunited – and stirring up anything to alter this state of harmony seemed too fraught with risk.

Yet he could not be entirely silent. In one small, perhaps rather foolish way, Dick vented his feelings, but afterwards he comforted himself that it had probably never been noticed.

And then the time had passed like minutes instead of days, days instead of weeks, and they were standing on the road, just outside the perimeter fence, and Pat was saying “See you in Switzerland,” and smiling at him, and Dick, who could have said anything, then, said “Right!” like some boy in an adventure novel, and they had set off in opposite directions, and for four years that was all Dick had as an ending.

After his own recapture, when Mohn had told him of Pat’s successful run to Switzerland, he could not have known he was causing Dick any especial pain – not that it would have prevented him. And Dick was glad for Pat’s sake, more than glad. But he’d realised then, with cold, sinking certainty, that it might now be a very long time before he saw Pat Grant again, if indeed he could ever find him.

\- - -

Having broken free of the party, Dick’s been standing out on the street - wolfing the bread and cheese and then pacing and smoking - for several minutes before he really registers the sleet cutting through the air, striking wet and cold against his face and hands. In his rush to get outside and away from view, he had waved away the offers from the servants to find his coat, and now he’s forced back into the shelter of the pillared portico, burying himself in a corner.

In the thick sleet and the darkness, it’s hard to make out even the buildings directly across the road. Out of long habit, he checks the windows and roofs for the tell-tale glint of a sniper-rifle.

If he accepts the job from Haydon, he’ll need those skills again. And ever since the offer first came, some part of him has felt relieved at the thought, at the idea of action, of once more living in the moment, of having far too much to occupy his mind to revert to the same old musings on the past. It is a pattern, once adopted, that is hard to contemplate changing.

Not that with Paul escaping the past will be at all easy. Dick may feel like a different person to the boy he was, but perhaps Paul will always see him in the same way, just as Dick, whatever the truth of matter, still cannot quite believe what Paul must have become, what he must have known about and done nothing to prevent.

The world doesn’t follow the plans you have for it. Dick remembers the two boys who thought they were men, who went skiing together and kissed, and delighted in their own naughtiness.

 _D_   
_ie Summe unseres Lebens sind die Stunden, in denen wir liebten…_

Was what he and Paul had, love? He might have thought so once. 

With food in his belly and nicotine in his blood he begins to feel calmer. Leaning back against the wall, taking a last drag from his cigarette, he knows he must go back inside, if only for warmth, but also to do what he came here for.

To face the past, and make peace with it. To understand, at last, exactly what it is he lost. Of course Pat matters. Pat always mattered and he’s always known it, even as he told himself the opposite, even as he tried not to think of it at all. But he’s a grown man and a strong one, and he will learn to think of it as just another lesson of the war, and just another thing that is over now and gone.

Turning around, he straightens his shoulders, ready to push back through the doors and return to the party.

But before he can move, the doors are opening in the other direction.

Pat is coming out, wearing his own coat, carrying another, which he silently offers to Dick.

“That’s not mine,” Dick hears himself saying, stupidly.

“Should fit, though,” Pat retorts.

It does, and Dick sinks gladly into the warmth, thrusting his hands into the pockets and thinking of a hundred cold walks and cold days and inadequate conversations. His pulse is beating hard in his throat, his mouth gone dry again and yet it is not fear – it is really nothing at all like fear.

Pat is studying his face. “Come with me,” he says softly. “I want to show you something.”

\- - -

Pat lives in a converted terrace near Lincoln’s Inn; the walk from the party takes twenty minutes and the weather keeps them silent, pressing forward eyes half-closed, but with each stride they take in tandem, Dick feels more comfortable next to him.

“Just hang your coat there,” Pat says first, when they get inside, having wiped their feet carefully on the communal hallway mat and made their way up to the second floor and Pat’s rooms.

The front door leads straight into the small living room, which is awash with engineering plans and architect’s designs alongside various catalogues, lists and piles of penguin paperbacks and newspapers.

“Preparing for India,” Pat explains, shifting a stack from an armchair. “Do have a seat.”

Dick would never have thought he’d be the neater of the two of them, but his own flat is tidy, almost featureless compared to this great explosion of existence.

Crammed into the room besides the armchair, a small sofa, a card table, a desk and a gramophone are several bookcases and any number of paintings and prints, many of them of Indian scenes, some seemingly by native craftsmen. On a diminutive, unvarnished wooden mantelpiece are ranged a series of framed photographs; a family group on a veranda fringed with ferns, a small boy – Pat? – sitting stiffly in a chair, a little girl standing to attention in a frock.

Pat, unmistakeably Pat but young, perhaps as a student, with his arm around another young man, both of them smiling at the camera. Dick averts his eyes.

There is so much, so very much, they never knew about each other.

Pat is moving to the mantelpiece, taking down the frame that has occupied the central position. It is thin and silver and the picture inside it seems out of place at first – an old, cheap piece of newsprint showing some women in overalls apparently making munitions, the accompanying article written in German.

Pat undoes the fastenings at the back of the frame and opens it, drawing out from behind the picture a folded piece of paper.

Suddenly, Dick remembers where he’s seen the thing before. He draws back in his chair, heart pounding, not quite able to make himself look up and see Pat’s expression.

“My letter from Gabrielle la Coeur, from the pit escape,” Pat is saying, and there’s a strange tone in his voice, as if the words are struggling to come out.

Dick does look up, and Pat is standing with the letter held in both hands, gently, as if it might break. The paper is ever so slightly shaking.

“I was a Flemish worker and she was supposed to be my fiancée.”

“I remember,” Dick says. He didn’t mean to whisper, but it was all he could do to speak.

“I don’t read French at all well - I think I told you that once. I just folded it up and put it with the rest of my papers. But I had to do a lot of waiting in Switzerland, a lot of time in the offices of this and that, and one day because I had done about everything else to waste time, I asked a fellow to translate it for me...”

Pat looks over the letter at him; he’s blushing and Dick can suddenly see, quite clearly, through all his careful composure, to what is burning deeper.

He rises, reaching out to take the letter in his own hands again, laughing slightly in his amazement at seeing it once more.

 _My darling_ – it reads, in the halting, indifferently accented French he’d hoped would pass for poor education if any German ever came to take it from Pat’s hands.

 _My darling, you are going away from me and above all I hope that you will be safe and you will be well. You have been my happiness, and I hope that sometimes I have been yours. I think that I was not quite alive until I knew you, and I hate you for leaving, I hate you for making me wish we could all stay here forever and nothing ever change. I hate the echo of your hands on me, for making me dream at night and long for you. It is a terrible thing to long for someone, most especially in war, and sometimes I hope it hurts you as badly, and sometimes I pray nothing ever hurts you. Be safe and be well, be happy, I do want you to be happy, and remember that it will always be good to see you again. All my love._

“I’ve told myself a hundred times I’m fool, and that Harris did say a French chap wrote it, and that in any case it was years ago.” Pat’s got his chin up again, defiant and brave. Their hands have met on the letter as it rests between them, fingertips brushing, and Dick can’t tear his eyes away from Pat’s, from the beautiful depths of them. “I wasn’t going to say anything tonight, I didn’t want to trap into something you might have grown out of.” He takes a shaky breath. “I’ve never been good at this, at...” he licks his lips, takes a breath and continues, determined. “Then, when you ran out, I could see that you weren’t as careless about the evening as you seemed to be, and I thought... I thought I’d take a risk.”

Dick feels a grin spreading over his face. “Doesn’t sound very much like you.”

“Oh Dick I can’t tell you, all the risks I’ve spent these years wishing I’d taken.”

They’re close now, standing together, breathing in rhythm. The fear has gone out of the room, and the frenetic, fearful urgency. They always were able to talk without speaking, and Dick can almost feel it, like a needle sliding home to a groove, as they find their pace again.

Pat is smiling, very softly. “I remember the first time I saw you in Colditz. You came in wearing that Polish uniform and French trousers and you looked around for five minutes and then made a face like you wanted to ring for the maid. I could see something had happened to you, something that had upset you more than most of the men in there, and I wanted to help, but you didn’t seem to register I existed until about three weeks later.”

“So you did notice me, then! I always – I’ve tried to remember so much and I can never be sure.”

“Who could help noticing you?” Pat laughs now. “It was trying to avoid showing you that I had, that was the hell of it.”

“It was hell,” Dick agrees. “I didn’t understand, then, just how many ways were imprisoned. How unnatural it was, to exist that way. After all those years, in so many ways I scarcely know you.” He gestures around the flat. “Come to that, I scarcely know myself – there are things I’ve done, Pat, things you don’t know about, things in the war...”

Pat sits on the sofa, leading Dick to sit down next to him. “Tell me, then.”

Dick holds out his hands, helpless. “You’re going to India. I’m supposed to be going to Berlin, if the Secret Service have anything to do with it.”

Pat takes his into his. Dick’s skin tingles, a sparkle of pleasure and warmth running through him. “Tell me. Tell me all of it. One always needs all the information to come up with a plan.”

It is more a glow than a sparkle, now, steady and wonderful. Dick smiles: “You always were very good at plans.”

Pat grins. “At least we both remember that correctly, then.”

And Dick leans in and grabs, and holds tight and close and fast, and kisses him

\- - -

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
